azure’’ world of disquieting natural beauty into
which the awestruck persona of Hayden’s ‘‘The
Diver’’ descends.
But lest we overstress the dark side of Hay-
den’s poetic world, I should add that nothing in
his work islessambiguous, nothingmoreaffirm-
ing of human hopes for illumination, perfection,
and freedom than his gallery of portraits sketch-
ing the possibilities for heroic action in the face of
even the most murderous and dispiriting forces.
The flighttoand fightforfreedom dramatized in
‘‘Runagate Runagate,’’ the rectifying resurrecting
images in his ‘‘Ballad of Nat Turner,’’ the tran-
scendent fortitude captured in his dedicatory son-
net ‘‘Frederick Douglass,’’ the unbowed tradition
of communal artistry celebrated in ‘‘Homage to
the Empress of Blues’’—combine to create a line-
age of heroicpresencespainted in rich hues and
delivered from oppression and obscurity, presen-
ces to which all of us, at the level of will and
aspiration, are kin.
As in the collections containing these earlier
poems, inAmerican JournalHayden’s portraits of
the famous and the faceless alternate. The opening
poem, ‘‘A Letter from Phillis Wheatley,’’ is suf-
fused with all the ironist’s recognition of incon-
gruities and his controlled acceptance of them: the
Sable Muse holds tears and outrage in check with
exquisite syntax and diction and with the somber
humor that, in Idyllic England, notes the Serpent’s
hiss on the flickering tongues of the ‘‘foppish
would-be wits’’ who dub her the ‘‘Cannibal Mock-
ingbird,’’ humor that dispels unseemly gloom with
the amusement won from a soot-faced English
chimney sweep’s query, ‘‘Does you, M’Lady,
sweep chimneys too?’’ Hayden’s rendering of
John Brown, originally commissioned to accom-
pany a portfolio of paintings by Jacob Lawrence,
reveals a man not cruel,not mad, but unsparing, a
life with the ‘‘symmetry of a cross,’’ driven by the
‘‘Fury of truth, its enigmas, its blinding illumina-
tions.’’ These familiar lives Hayden counter-
weights with those of the anonymous Rag Man
who faces the wind and the winter streets with
scarecrow patches ‘‘and wordless disdain as
though wrapped in fur,’’ rejecting the world and
its fleeting pity; or ‘‘The Tattooed Man,’’ a ‘‘gro-
tesque outsider’’ whose body is a bizarre, sideshow
mosaic that feeds his pride and repels the love he
wants but ‘‘cannot (will not?)’’ cleanse his flesh to
win. His is the heroism of the stoic (‘‘all art is pain /
suffered and outlived’’) and of the realist (‘‘It is too
late / for any change / but death. / I am I’’).
The poetic inspiration behind Hayden’s images
of the heroic came early in his career and stayed late.
The apprentice poems ofHeart-Shape in the Dust
were largely imitative of the themes and conven-
tions of the New Negro Renaissance, and reflected
a young poet still in search of his voice. These first
poems nonetheless made the rich storehouse of
legend and lore (acquired by Hayden as a folklore
researcher for the Federal Writer’s Project in the
late thirties) into an enduring framework for later
achievements. In this first book, his long mass chant
‘‘These Are My People,’’ his portrait of gallows-
bound slave rebel Gabriel Prosser, the blues-toned
resilience he pictures in the ‘‘po’colored boy’’ of
‘‘Bachanale’’—all offered shadings of the ordinary
extraordinary heroic spirit that Hayden would con-
tinue to sing long after the formulaic stridency and
vaguely socialistic ideology in which these poems
were couched had disappeared from his poetic
scheme.
During these formative years, Hayden absorb-
ed and reconciled a variety of poetic influences—
Dunbar, Cullen, Langston Hughes, Millay, Sand-
burg, Hart Crane, Stephen Vincent Benet, Eliot,
and Yeats. In his second book,The Lion and the
Archer(written with Myron O’Higgins and pub-
lished in 1948), and inFigures of Time(1955) Hay-
den showed the impress of what he later called ‘‘a
strategic experience’’ in his life: as a graduate stu-
dent at the University of Michigan he had studied
with W. H. Auden and Auden had shown him his
strengths and weaknesses as a poet in ways no one
else had done.The Lion and the ArcherandFigures
of Timepresented Haydenas stylistmoving toward
the baroque, the surreal, and away from what he
rejected as ‘‘chauvinistic and doctrinaire.’’ The
dated dialect and colloquialism of his earliest work
gave way now to dense, sculpted language which
glittered and whirled like a prism. And though his
folk themes and heroic motifs acquired a new kind
of grandeur, his audience—his black readers in
particular—were not uniformly pleased with the
changes.Heart-Shape in the Dusthad been praised
inOpportunitymagazine as ‘‘a tree marriage of form
and content, a happy fusion of mastery of technique
with the rough and raw material of life.’’ And Rob-
ert Hayden had been pictured to be a worthy chal-
lenger to Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown as
an interpreter of Afro-American experience.
But as the scathingly sarcastic review inCrisis
magazine ofThe Lion and the Archershowed,
Hayden’s movement toward a more complex
and consciously modernist poetry exacted theRunagate Runagate